Mixtape Of The Week: DJ Angelbaby Get Pumped Vol. 1

In Baltimore, my beautiful burned-out wasteland of a hometown, things don’t change too quickly. The last time I filled up my minivan in town, a couple of weeks ago, the car next to mine was blasting Young Jeezy’s 2005 Gucci Mane dis “Stay Strapped,” a song that was in heavy mixtape rotation when I left town almost eight years ago. 98 Rock, the city’s AOR station, still plays the same Slaughter songs they played when I was in middle school. And in the rare occasions in the past few years when I’ve been around other people and hearing Baltimore club music, the city’s great jacked-up house music offshoot, they’ve been the club anthems of the short moment in the early- and mid-’00s when it looked like the rest of the world might start paying attention to that fiercely local scene (“You Big Dummy,” “Watch Out For The Big Girl,” “Don’t Make Me Kill” — some of my favorite pieces of wild-out music ever). Admittedly, it’s not like I’ve been logging weekends at the Paradox; my last time dancing to club music around other people was at my brother’s wedding, in an Iowa cornfield. But when you’re not in town, going out and paying attention, you can forget that club music is kids’ music, and that kids are always pushing it forward. Beyond the brief out-of-nowhere 2009 moment where DJ Class’s near-perfect “I’m The Shit” became a minor national hit, the music has had barely any profile outside of a few northeastern pockets in the last few years. But it’s still relentlessly moving forward, and that’s something you can hear all over DJ Angelbaby’s great new scene-survey mix Get Pumped Vol. 1.

I hadn’t heard anything about this mix before Brandon Soderberg Tumblred about it the other day, but I’ve been diving in since, and the effect is something like visiting your old high school and noticing where they put in new windows or painted over old murals. DJ Angelbaby is a young presence on 92Q, Baltimore’s great rap station, which always devotes big chunks of its weekend nights to club music sets, usually straight from the club. The producers she includes on her mix are mostly young, in their teens or early ’20s. She makes a bit of room for producers from the emerging club scenes in Philly and Newark, and you can’t really tell who’s from where unless you start Googling producer names; it all sounds like Baltimore. As ever, club music producers shamelessly pilfer hooks and vocal samples from whatever rap songs are big at any given moments, and certain voices are all over this mix: Meek Mill, Nicki Minaj. A couple of 2 Chainz verses get to play out relatively unmolested, which is practically unherad of. Lil Jon yayuuuhs — a crucial part of club tracks for way longer than you might expect, have finally mostly disappered; Waka Flocka bows, it turns out, make a more-than-adequate substitute. But the changes aren’t all superficial like those. The synthed-up sound of recent pop and rap has trickled through to club music, and tracks like the one that hijacks Rihanna’s “Diamonds” sound positively lush compared to what you’d hear a few years ago.

Still, this is still club music, and it still serves the same function it always did. Even at its smoothest, this is still insanely propulsive and rudimentary dance music. That Rihanna remix sounds like someone welded her voice onto the exhaust pipe of a backfiring car. Get Pumped moves through 39 tracks in 53 minutes; only one non-outro/non-bonus track gets to break the two-minute barrier. The tempo never varies; it pounds away consistently and turns your brain into jelly five minutes in. And for all its intensity, this is still euphoric, celebratory music — music created expressly to help kids from a hopeless place lose their minds with joy. The horror-movie bell-chimes of Kanye West’s remix of Chief Keef’s “Don’t Like” become cartoonish bubble-pops. The chilly synth-stabs of Kanye’s “Mercy” work in club music almost too perfectly, and the squeaky-bed sound-effect on Big Sean’s “Marvin Gaye And Chardonnay” somehow stops being the most annoying thing ever. My favorite track on the mix is probably DJ Pierre’s “End Of Time” remix, which turns an Afrobeat-jacking Beyonce album track into something even warmer and more ebullient than it already was. I can’t remember the last time I heard a DJ mix that crammed in the grin-per-minute ratio I’m getting from this thing.

This isn’t a classically constructed DJ set, with peaks and valleys and buildups and releases. It doesn’t tell a story. Instead, it’s all one seamless unceasing burst of adrenaline. Its 39 tracks, which Angelbaby expertly syncs up and sequences, find about 39 different ways to make your brain explode. Plenty of people can’t stand club music, and I get that; it’s about as mechanistic and single-minded as dance music gets. But if you’ve found yourself enjoying it before, you owe it to yourself to check out Get Pumped; it’s the sort of thing that gives me new hope for a scene I should’ve never stopped paying attention to.

I would have just picked a mixtape from next week for this week, seeing as that there are a couple of good ones coming out on 1/15 who won’t get due notice.

I hate the DJ Angelbaby. As a Maryland native, a lot of us who aren’t part of the WASP / DC-loving, Orioles Nation politics club crawling culture that permeates the state look at DJ Angelbaby as a punch line in our mixtape scene. While the Western half is boring and quiet, our mixtape music is at least of good quality (Danger Hoodlem, Snazzy J, the start of Oooba and today’s modern scene of DJ Rock-fil-a, Bonerjamz and $am$ung.)

It’s too easy to make fun of this, especially when the last paragraph acknowledging it’s not classically constructed DJ set. I guess my realization here is that Tom is transitioning from a once fresh-eared music scribe into one who is not only a vet, but one also easing into his “Yes, I really, really am a dad” days, still trying to cling onto his younger club and DJ music scene years unbeknownst to him that those which he clings to aren’t even the slightest bit important to the culture’s tapestry.

I’m so stressed and frustrated, man. Coming off a restless and unfulfilling holiday, I can’t keep up with my blog this week at all because there’s way too much content my one-man band can’t handle in the post-work hour time frame I have, the gym is over-crowded as hell with annoying college bros, thus it’s taking me longer to get my workouts done because of it and I’m hitting a milestone decade changing b-day in a few weeks that I’m dreading because I don’t know — I don’t know how to relax.

Oh haiiii. Angel Baby is a big deal. Not sure what this dude is going on about. Since K-Swift’s death, Baltimore has kinda lacked a figure in club that was a DJ, first and foremost. KW Griff is the greatest but he can only do so much! Meanwhile, all of the young kids doing amazing work (in particular, Murder Mark and Pierre, who had a remix on ‘Vicki Leekx’ and was sampled by Nguzunguzu and still has no hipster blog love somehow) have been releasing mixes of all of their productions, which is just not how the music is heard in clubs or on the radio. Angelbaby is filling a void and she’s doing it in a way that’s letting nearby Philly and Newark scenes in, which is smart and about time. And her DJing style, this just like chaotic rush of tracks on tracks on tracks is what Baltimore club sounds like for people under 20. I hope more people start checking this stuff out.

Most Viewed

As his band traveled through a lightning storm somewhere in the American Midwest, Ariel "Pink" Rosenberg yelled at me over the telephone. It was April 2005, and I was holed up in the spare bedroom of a rented house in York, PA, repeatedly posing pre-prepared interview questions in order to be heard over the noise… More »

Jay Z bought the Swedish company Aspiro's streaming music service Tidal less than a month ago, but that didn't stop him from rolling out his rebranded product today with lots of fanfare from his famous friends. Rumors before the 5PM livestream suggested that Jay's newfangled Tidal would be launched with exclusive… More »

Jay Z is not playing with his big rollout of the streaming service Tidal. After many big stars tweeted their support last night, those same stars have shown up in a new 30-second spot for the service's big relaunch today. In the ad, we see a collection of luminaries -- Jay, Kanye West,… More »

Jay Z wants you to know that Tidal, the Scandinavian high-fidelity streaming service that he bought earlier this month, is a big deal. So he didn't just get some of music's biggest stars to tweet about the service's big relaunch, which is happening today. He got them all to change their social media… More »

Burger Records held their fourth annual Burgerama festival at the Observatory in Santa Ana this past weekend. The two-day fest featured appearances from bands like Together PANGEA, Fidlar, La Luz, Gang Of Four, Public Access T.V. and many, many more. Ty Segall and Weezer were the headliners, and Rivers Cuomo's dad Frank Cuomo made… More »